You would think that a cheerful voice or a friendly look in a feedback video would do wonders for the learning process. That was the opinion of researchers Yun Zhang, Fangzheng Zhao, and Richard E. Mayer of the University of California, who also did a study I found via Paul Kirschner. They wanted to know what happens when you get feedback from someone who looks happy, and whether it matters whether that person is a man or a woman. The result is a surprisingly nuanced story about emotion, gender, and learning that shows how you feel about feedback doesn’t always determine what you learn from it.

In the experiment, 160 students were given a lesson on human vision, followed by practice questions and feedback videos. The videos came in four flavours with combinations of: male or female, cheerful or neutral. Think: an enthusiastic actress explaining why you were wrong, versus an actor with a poker face doing the same. What did they find? Students who received cheerful feedback found their feedback giver more sympathetic and competent, and felt more positive about themselves. But that had no effect on their test scores. The lesson material stuck equally well or poorly, regardless of whether the feedback was delivered with a smile or a straight back.

Even more striking and in line with what we mentioned in our second myth book, female feedback givers were systematically perceived as less competent and less supportive than men, even when they gave the same explanation. That says a lot about the persistence of gender stereotypes, even in a context where objective knowledge is central. Incidentally, that judgment also had no influence on the test results. In other words, we have quite a few (pre)judgments about who we perceive as “competent”, but that does not necessarily have to thwart our learning process.

However, we should not dismiss these findings. The fact that students feel better when given positive and friendly feedback does make the experience more pleasant and perhaps more sustainable. And if we want students to feel welcome, acknowledged and motivated in an online learning environment, a little emotional warmth can really help. But it also makes us think: if women are systematically seen as less capable, even in scripted videos with identical content, we still have a long way to go in educational design.

Abstract of the study :

Background and Objective
The positivity principle states that students learn better from instructors who display positive rather than negative or neutral emotions in multimedia lessons (Lawson et al. 2021a). This study extends this work by exploring the role of affective and social cues displayed by feedback providers, such as their emotional tone and gender, on multimedia learning.

Method
In this between-subject study, 160 college students received a five-section video lesson on human vision, with two practice questions inserted after each section. After each question, students received explanatory feedback videos presented by either a male or female feedback provider who displayed either positive or neutral emotion through gesture and voice.

Results
Students who received feedback from providers with a positive emotional tone rated the provider higher on perceived positive emotion, supportiveness and competence, as well as on their own feelings of positivity. However, the emotional tone of the feedback provider did not impact posttest scores. Additionally, female feedback providers were perceived to be more negative, less supportive and less competent than male feedback providers, but the gender of feedback providers had no effect on posttest scores.

Conclusion
This study expands the positivity principle (Horovitz and Mayer 2021) and the cognitive-affective model of e-learning (Lawson et al. 2021a) by showing that positive emotional cues from feedback providers enhance learning, similar to the impact of the instructor’s emotional cues in presenting the main lesson. These findings highlight the broader role of positivity in creating engaging and supportive multimedia learning environments across contexts.